You know Jessops, yeah - that high street photographic chain? It's a little known fact that it was once sued by Aesop, writer of the famous fables.

See, Jessops originated as Jessop's Fables - a collection of stories that were eerily similar in tone and content to Aesop's Fables, albeit mostly about cameras and stuff. When he read Jessop's book, Aesop threatened to sue, but Jessop countered with a cunning plan - by pretending to be a high street photographic chain.

At that point, Aesop - a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in Ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE - had no choice but to withdraw his legal action.

Which is a long-winded and not entirely successful way of saying this: the history of video gaming is littered with the discarded undies of a million clones - games that have shamelessly ripped-off other games, and (for the the most part) inexplicably gotten away with it - from Flappy Bird's countless imitators, to Saints Row's wanton aping of Grand Theft Auto.

Here are but ten of those games, what we have just refered to. Aesopppp!

10. DONKEY KONG / KONG

Ocean's Kong isn't the only blatant Donkey Kong clone, but it's in this list because Digi2000's own Mr Biffo - a man who's one bad dinner away from becoming a tramp - remembers being bought it along with a 48k upgrade cartridge for his ZX Spectrum. The chief difference between the two games is that Kong's Kong looked more like a heavily-set man in a morph suit, with a couple of peep-holes for his mighty moobs.

9. HALO / N.O.V.A.

Gameloft, the people behind N.O.V.A., have made a bit of a name for themselves by making stripped-down, iPad lookalikes of proper console franchises. In short, they've become the video game equivalent of The Asylum, the movie studio famed for releasing low-budget cash-ins of blockbuster movies (ie; Transmorphs instead of Transformers, Atlantic Rim instead of Pacific Rim, and I Am Omega instead of I Am Legend).

N.O.V.A. looks the part, and we might all pretend that it plays alright, but - let's face it - you can drop an Oxo cube in a glass of fartwater, and while it might look like Pepsi it certainly won't taste like Pepsi. Trust us on this.

8. SUPER MARIO BROS. / GREAT GIANA SISTERS

Incredibly, Great Giana Sisters is a brand that outlived its reputation as a knockoff - even getting a recent console update. This is despite an urban legend which alleges that the 8/16-bit computer platformer was hit with a lawsuit from Nintendo, which led to it being removed from sale. In fact there was no actual lawsuit from Nintendo: just some very stern words... Words along the lines of "Stop doing that or we'll kill you".

7. ALONE IN THE DARK/RESIDENT EVIL

When Resident Evil first came out we were stunned how few people remarked upon its similarity to Infogrames' Alone in the Dark. Indeed, it was so un-remarked-upon that we still harbour a bit of resentment about it.

Basically, imagine you were the kid in the crowd who could see that The Emperor was striding about in the nude, and not a new suit woven from the finest silk, and everyone told you to shut-up and stop being so stupid. You'd bear the scares of that for the rest of your life. We have.

6. PAC-MAN / HANGLYMAN

Possibly the most outrageous rip-off on this list, Hanglyman (apparently, a corruption of a Japanese attempt to pronounce "hungry man") was effectively a bootleg that somehow actually made it into arcades. They could've at least made the ghosts a different colour.

5. TABLE TENNIS/PONG

Pong may be considered the first proper video game, but Nolan Bushnell's table tennis - ahem - sim was in fact "based upon" the table tennis game featured on the Magnavox Odyssey console. The makers of the Odyssey successfully sued Atari, forcing the company to cough up a $700,000 licensing fee.

4. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK / ATTACK OF THE MUTANT CAMELS

We shall tread carefully here... Y'know, we're all for supporting the mavericks, but there are some people - such as, say, Atari - who argue that veteran games developer Jeff Minter has a history of taking other people's games, and recreating them... hiding a certain lack of originality behind llamas, sheep and camels, or psychedelic visuals.

We couldn't possibly comment - we did once, and got called a rude word. Instead, we shall just ask you to compare the above screenshots, and judge for yourself.

3. STREET FIGHTER II / FIGHTER'S HISTORY

There were plenty of me-too beat 'em ups that followed in the wake of Street Fighter II. Fighter's History is notable because... well, just look at it, for pity's sake. Capcom tried to sue Data East over the game, but lost the case. The judge was clearly a massive div.

2. THE LEGEND OF ZELDA / GOLDEN AXE WARRIOR

If you're going to rip-off an RPG you might as well rip off the best. Though it borrowed the characters from Sega's Golden Axe beat 'em up franchise, it borrowed/stole its visual style, soundtrack and gameplay entirely from Nintendo's Zelda series. We can imagine how Nintendo must have felt: we once had our trousers and dignity stolen at our local swimming pool.

1.POKEMON / ROBOPON

Like many games on this list, Pokemon drags a posse of wannabes around in its wake, like a string of fecal matter hanging from a goldfish anus. Robopon stands out because it even lifted the idea of having multiple versions of the same game - in this case Sun, Star and Moon editions. Inexplicably, the series spawned a number of sequels, and an N64 title. So, not so much a goldfish fecal string, as a shotgun blast of explosive diarrhoea.

The Resi/AITD thing's always annoyed me, especially the way the developers have encouraged comparison to Sweet Home, a game it has much less in common with. Reminds me of the way Suspiciously Similar Indie Bands draw attention to everything but their painfully obvious primary influence. AITD was a hit in Japan and they'd definitely have been aware of it. I'm not sure I've seen an interview where they've even acknowledged it. Even the term "survival horror" comes from AITD's "ambient survival horror". At this point it feels like some bizarre in-joke everyone just plays along with.

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Old Red

1/5/2015 03:08:25 pm

I did read an interview where Shinji Mikami gave a nod to Alone In The Dark's influence on Resident Evil.

First off, welcome back Digitiser! Me read you from 1993 until 2003. I'm all grown up now, at 30, and enjoy nothing more than yodelling and picking one's nose.

I'd like to suggest Crash Nitro Kart or any of the other shameless Mario Kart rip offs. Plus the majority of modern shoot-em-ups are Halo and CoD affairs with increasingly daft ideas. Perhaps they're not shameless enough, but they make MY BLOOD BOIL! Arrghh!!

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Mr Biffo

30/4/2015 03:34:10 am

Ah, cheers for the niceness, Jareth.

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Mr Smith

30/4/2015 04:07:34 am

I love stuff like this, with left and right comparison shots. LOVE IT.
Here's a couple more places to get it. Warning: You might waste hours on it.

I've never quite understood the Jeff Minter cult (not a typo). I'm not disputing his skill at making a good game - Tempest 2000 and its various offspring are all more than decent shooters. What I don't get is when people call him a genius on par with Miyamoto or Kojima, or an early pioneer like Matt Smith, given he largely makes the *same* game (OK, small handful of games) over and over again, and didn't even come up with the original idea for any of them in the first place.

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graysonscolumn

1/5/2015 03:27:29 am

Elite / Star Clash on the BBC Micro, anyone? The latter ripped off the former to the extent of borrowing ruddy great chunks of the same code...